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Collateral Souls has been accepted by steam to be released! Now, I’m no where close to ready for this so I don’t expect release until around mid-2018. Here is the roadmap I foresee going forward to get the game ready to launch:

Art

The game looks like terrible programmer art (because that is what it is 🙂 ) If the game is going to have any broad appeal I need to get this looking much more consistent and sounding like, well anything. The sprite updates have given a new layer of information I can play with, I want to take advantage of this as much as possible and have more creature/ability telegraphing to help reinforce gameplay concepts to new users. I also want to incorporate some basic sound effects and layered music to add to the thematic aspects of the game.

Challenge Mode

The current challenge mode is very random and and extremely unbalanced. I want to align this with a more consistently enjoyable experience and integrate the Steam API’s leaderboards for daily seeded challenges. There is a lot of work to do here and I haven’t designed it all out yet.

Broader Input Support

The game was originally designed to work on the number pad, but not everyone has one of those and the qwerty controls are a bit terrible. I want to get mouse and controller support. Not just superficially so, but actually take the time to make them shine with details like mouse based pathfinding previews. Going to be a lot of tuning in this area to get it right but the controls seem to have been the greatest sticking point for complaints with gameplay so it will be worth it to get right.

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I don’t want to do an early access program as I don’t feel the game has enough gusto outside of niche roguelike players at the moment. However I don’t plan on suspending releases until launch either. I haven’t looked into the details of the Steam beta programs, or releasing development versions with steam API integrations but once I figure it out there will be further announcements on how exactly I am going to handle this.

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Hi everyone! I was down for surgery and lost a lot of time, so small update this month. I tried to pull in a roadmap feature that would present interesting decisions but be quick to implement and test. Also had some awesome Collateral Souls let’s play videos from Huw2k8 so if you are new here and want to check out the game it’s a great way to get a look.

New Features

Unstable Portals – High risk high reward floor exits

Certain floors starting at floor 4 will now have unstable portals as alternate exits

Using these portals will provide the player with a bonus perk

Using these portals will also increase the difficulty of all future creatures

Changes

Ranged attack and target cycling controls now on UI for easy discovery

Status plaques now hide themselves when not relevant, opening up much of the side panel UI for future features

There have been some features I’ve wanted to do for a while to make the game more approachable to new players. After all the Coffee-break Roguelike genre is meant to be a low barrier of entry. So this month’s update is all about the little things that help guide new players from confusion into mastery.

New Features

Sprites! There is now a tileset setting in the settings menu. There is still the original ascii form and the (now default) sprite tileset. Hopefully this allows players to get their bearings more easily when looking at the playfield.

Perk Guide – A new menu that lets you read up on all perks in the game and their relationships with other perks.

Changes

Score System Reworked- The old score system promoted getting farther as doing better, even if getting farther at the expense of future survivability. The new score system is much more focused on promoting masterful play and is tightly measured and transparent so players can see what they are doing and how it effects their score. The score system is also now setup to be on a 0-1000 scale, 1000 being a perfect game. So scores are much easier to understand than their previous exponential ramp.

Due to the changes in scoring, your high score table will be reset with this update.

Bug Fixes

Tentacle Whip visuals reworked to be less taxing on the system and look more tentacle-y. Better performance but should also mitigate rare draw resource crashes related to the effect.

Carnage no longer try to use ranged attacks even though they are terrible at them

World collapse memory load greatly reduced by simplifying the visual effects. Should prevent any memory related crashes during the event

Added World collapse ON/OFF setting as a failsafe if the event is still problematic it can be disabled. The transition to the next floor still occurs but the mini game is skipped and fair amount of XP is granted to make up for the mini game being skipped.

Had a lot of good feedback come in and so this update is bursting with lots of big and small changes. Many of these came as suggestions from the community – you all are awesome. Keep the feedback coming and I will continue to make the game as awesome as I can for you!

New Features

Assault Rifle Completely Redesigned

Base Rifle now has burst fire with additional attacks at reduced accuracy

Holy Fire now starts creatures burning, including creatures in between you and your primary target

Paradox Trigger now remakes missed and glancing shots at a closer target

Sniper Advanced Perks Redesigned

Reaper now hits all creatures between you and your primary target

Heartseeker now builds damage by waiting with a creature targeted

New Boons

Carry the light of the world

New Curses

Fear the brooding mother

The end begins

Controls

The mouse may now be used to target creature by clicking on them

VI directional controls are now available as an optional setting

Changes

HP Boost Removed. Player now starts with 25 HP, was 20

Focused Removed. Player now starts with +5% higher accuracy

Marksman and Shotgun are now mutually exclusive. Shotgun maximum range increased by 1

If the game gets greenlight the steam APIs can cover some awesome features like global daily/seeded challenge leaderboards. Mostly though I’m using it as part of a community growth project. The few of you that have been enjoying the game even when I’ve been in mostly stealth marketing mode will always been my favorites. I love you all! Hopefully I can find you some new friends.

Hi new friends! if you just got here you can get the game directly here: